Book Smart

Fall 1991 found Francine Hirsch entering the Ph.D. program in history at Princeton, just as unprecedented change was unfolding in the former Soviet Union.

Watching the Soviet Union dissolve, Hirsch elected to study the processes surrounding its formation some 70 years earlier. She found that once in power, the Bolsheviks knew next to nothing about the land and peoples they were trying to govern.

“The Bolsheviks relied greatly on expert ethnographers, local elites and other experts from the former Russian empire for information about the various groups and regions within their borders. That information was instrumental in shaping how the Soviet regime saw its population,” Hirsch says. “Many of these experts and elites were enamored with the ‘national idea.’ They helped to foster the creation of new nations in regions where clans and tribal identities predominated.”

The impact of the international context interested Hirsch. She was amazed at the extent to which the experts and local elites assisting the Bolsheviks took ideas from European states and colonial empires.

For a decade, Hirsch conducted research in Russia and the United States.

“I really wanted to find materials that shed light on how ‘ordinary people’ were affected by and responded to Soviet nationality policy. Some of my most interesting finds were petitions or letters from individuals or entire communities to Soviet leaders, asking for things such as national language schools or a resolution to disputed territory.”

Her trips to Russia yielded friendships with a cross section of archivists, historians and teachers. She says that she heard many stories about World War II and the early post-war years from her friends’ parents and grandparents.

“Most of them had mixed feelings about the dramatic changes taking place in their society,” she says. “There is still nostalgia for the USSR; some Russians continue to remember it as a multinational state in which diverse people lived harmoniously in a ‘friendship of peoples.’”

Hirsch says that Soviet nationality policy was, by and large, brutal and repressive.

“The Soviets took nation-building very seriously. They poured enormous resources into creating official nationalities, with official national cultures, languages, histories and institutions. In the process, they also stamped out local traditions, cultures and practices, and even committed mass murder,” she says.

Nonetheless, Hirsch says there might be some lessons for American policy-makers to glean from the Soviet experience.

“The Soviet attempt to transform Central Asia, for example, shows what can happen when an outside power comes into a region and tries to change the accepted order of things, creating new ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’” she says. “Soviet-sponsored nation-building took on a life of its own as local communities tried to work the new situation to their advantage, and significant violence between communities erupted. There are still border disputes today in some of the same regions contested in the 1920s and ’30s.”